Hatching

This debut feature from Finnish writer/director, Hanna Bergholm is almost perfectly pitched. It's about a young girl, Tinja, played by Siiri Solalinna (also, amazingly, her screen debut), who is struggling to live up to her mother's exacting expectations. Mother, Äiti, played by Sophia Heikkilä, wants her daughter to win the school gymnastics competition and show the world through her 'lifestyle' vlogs what a great family they are. Rounding out this family are downtrodden husband, Isä (Jani Volanen) and irritating son, Matias (Oiva Ollila), though they all seem to be only mildly on board with the whole social media enterprise. 

At the beginning of the film, a panicky blackbird gets trapped in the living room of the family house and smashes up the place. After catching it, Tinja asks if she can release it outside. Mother, instead, snaps its neck and tells Tinja to dispose of it. Later that night, Tinja is awoken by a shrill squawking and upon searching the creepy forest outside, she finds the bird, barely alive beside a nest. Here's where the film hints at the way it to means to go on. Tinja realises she must put the poor animal out of its misery and proceeds to bludgeon its head with a rock. It's hard to finish off, so she must repeat the act a fair few times. Not for the squeamish, it's safe to say. Finally, she notices an egg in the nest and decides to take it home. 

You might guess that a film called Hatching will have something come out of the egg. You'd be right. Not only does the egg grow to about the size of a child's bean bag, it also has a faint glow inside AND seems to absorb Tinja's tears. When it does hatch, the creature appears to be a cross between a skeksis from The Dark Crystal and an archaeopteryx - with hands. Top animatronic puppet work here from Gustav Hoegen. It appears horrific but it soon transpires that it's connected emotionally in some way with Tinja, as the neighbour's dog finds out the hard way. As time passes, and the creature transforms, the mental link between the two causes several, umm, situations. Tinja goes into a fit as she appears to virtually inhabit the 'other's' body during these moments of confrontation. This push and pull, a kind of Cronenberg-ian dichotomy, becomes a key facet of the film. 

Bergholm and co-writer, Ilja Rautsi have cleverly balanced the body horror and dark humour with themes of parental pressure and the beginning of menstruation - glimpsing spots of blood on the bed, Father assumes it's Tinja's first period (not a carcass), and awkwardly leaves the room. The film could even be viewed as a revenge thriller of sorts, with Mother paying a high price for her self-absorption. Her special 'friend', Tero (Reino Nordin) says to her, "You only see yourself, huh? Your daughter has some serious problems." Heikkilä and Solalinna are brilliant and the finale left me with a huge grin on my dial. Highly recommended Finnish gem, possibly best of the year so far.

Hatching opens in Perth on May 26th at the Palace cinemas.

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Some of the physical movement reminded me of Hideo Nakata's Ringu (1998), and the feel of the film has a cousin in Tomas Alfredson's excellent Let the Right One In (2008).